Internet sales tax is coming. After several years of talk, it looks like Congress is finally setup to start going after online shoppers to pay sales tax on purchases.JammieWearingFool says:
The government's insatiable thirst for tax revenue is about to hit online shoppers, who've largely managed to escape onerous state taxes by shopping at sites such as Amazon.com [and The Anime Corner Store]. So if you've been wondering what to do with that $13-a-week windfall from King Obama, just forward it to your state government.
The big question for us evey time this comes up is how are they going to administer collection of the taxes. Right now, most people are supposed to claim their out of state purchases on their state income tax return and pay 'use tax' on them, but few people actually do and this system is basically unenforceable, so the government wants to shift the burden for collecting online sales taxes onto the businesses that sell on the net. Oh Fun!
But there is huge problem with that. We already collect and distribute sales tax for orders shipped to customers in Virginia (because our warehouse is located in Virginia), of which there is a lot of paperwork, time, and expense involved. How can a business like us possibly hope to collect and distribute tax payments to 50 different state governments with different rules and tax rates. On top of that, many states even have local sales taxes broken down by city or county that have to be collected individually, so there are really maybe 1,000 different jurisdictions across the US that have different sales tax rates and rules. Pretty much impossible for us to do without some sort of centralized system, and that too is a quandary because the Federal Government has no authority to collect taxes for state governments.
To be honest, the libertarian part of me views online purchases as an exercise in civil disobedience to protest already ridiculously high taxation across the broad spectrum of federal, state, and local governments. Of course, most people would never think of it that way, and shop online instead for the deals and/or convenience. But retailer associations that have large brick and mortar memberships have been steadily lobbying for tax parity on online purchases. And of course, states are seeing declining real estate tax revenue and you KNOW they just can't cut spending accordingly, so they are looking to makup the difference anyway possible.
I would prefer to see them leave the system as it is and have each state deal with enforcing their own existing tax laws on their own citizens. That way citizens of each state can deal with the elected officials in their state and local governments directly, just as it's supposed to be. But now that the era of gargantuan federal government is upon us, I'm sure those concerns will eventually be thrown to the wind and we'll all end up paying more. A national online sales tax system is coming, like it or not.
As JammieWearingFool says:
In case you're wondering, and I know you are, this isn't just another Democrat tax scheme. It's bi-partisan confiscation of your money.
Yep, that's about right.
